Saturday, April 19, 2008

Can do (and teach).

Sure, it's kind of a weird thing, but I really dig the long hallway in the basement level of the CBS2/KCAL9 TV station. It runs almost the entire length of the building and I have it in mind that I could hold an awesome underground weiner dog race and become like an organized crime Don in the underground weiner dog race world.

Uh-oh, it feels like I'm not getting any support on this.

I guess I really need to stop blogging when I'm half asleep. (It's just so much more difficult to type after I'm fully alseep.)

Hey, look, it's Saturday morning. Kind of overcast here in Los Angeles and I should be outside tending to my land. I've got a lot of trimming and weeding to do today. Dellis is at a meeting for her job and I'm kind of goofing off because it's been a long week.

Lots of training and lots of driving through traffic. Yesterday wasn't too bad. We were short staffed, so I had to hit the streets with a reporter instead of coaching a trainee.

My shift started at 4:30pm and I was on the way to Moorpark College by about 5:13pm. Actually it was exactly 5:13pm, because I looked at my atomic watch (and took a picture of it) just as I left the station.

The story was about the college hosting a LAN party to attract and recruit potential students to its' Computer Studies Department.

Tech Reporter Rich DeMuro met me at the school and we got right to work. The station wanted a liveshot during the KCAL 8PM newscast. That means I'd have to work up a little bit of sweat to get the story shot, edited, and the liveshot set up in the time we had available.

I asked one of the party goers if they were competing with anyone over the internet and the guy (he looked like all of 17 years old) started to explain to me about local area networks. I know what a LAN is.

(sigh)

All I really wanted to know? Was he competing against someone in the room or in a room somewhere else in the world? If I ask one thing, that doesn't mean I don't know anything. (Gall darned young whippersnappers!)

We get the story shot and I set up the truck for our liveshot while the reporter logs the disk and writes the package. We are crunched for time and we debate whether to cut a VOSOT for the 8PM show.

It all comes down to how fast I can edit. Can I cut a package in less than thirty minutes? Keep in mind, I haven't cut anything in weeks. With all the training, I've barely cut a dozen stories in the past year.

Can I do it? I don't know. Maybe.

Heh-heh, probably not the most confidence inspiring response, but I tend to not want to overestimate my ability to work under pressure.

We edited the piece and even managed to get most of the NAT sound into it we wanted. No jump cuts and no black holes. As always, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my teaching the edit system hadn't completely rusted out my ability to cut.

I fed the package and dialed up the IFB, then got out to the camera. Rich took his spot in front of the lens. We were standing by and feeling as if we had done pretty well for ourselves. Someone from the station tells us over the IFB our hit time had changed. We were now later in the show.

Grrr.

What we accomplished in the time we had available wasn't something everyone on staff could have done. Cutting the piece and not hitting for another twenty-five minutes is pretty typical. Rich and I both wanted to get that pat on the back and feel like rock stars for getting extra warp speed out of the Enterprise, but most of our photogs and reporters could have done it with that extra time.